Alex's swim journal

Progress report...

The last couple of weeks have been pretty good for my swimming. I passed the 450-mile mark for the year. My weekend long swim is back up to 5000 yards... I'm looking at doing the 3000 and 6000 postals on successive weekends here at the beginning of November. The flip-turns have gotten a lot better, though still a bit inconsistent. Also, I'm cautiously re-introducing interval training into the routine as my body seems to have adapted to the additional (or just different) stresses of the flip-turn. This is what I did today:

This is similar to a 4K workout I did last Thursday; my times last Thursday were faster, especially on the 200s and I added another 1000 in intervals after the 200 set (5 x 100 on 2:00 and 10 x 50 on 1:00). The intervening weekend was hectic as my 92-year old Grandpa passed away and I drove to Austin for the funeral (about 2400-miles roundtrip; 40 hours in the car). But I couldn't miss it, and it was so great to see all the family and reminisce a little about the long life of that wonderful man... he's an inspiration to me.

While in Austin I did a couple of stress-melting swims at Deep Eddy, about 4K total. The water was perfect (70 degrees) and the air temps weren't bad (50s), though they were cool enough to keep a lot of folks away. Not nearly as crowded as it was this summer... here's a picture of the pool I took in August:
Didn't have to circle swim on Sunday or Monday mornings (or even share a lane), unlike in the summer. It was perfect fall weather, though, a true blessing to be swimming through spring water on a sunny, crisp Autumn day in Austin.

My thoughts are with the folks cleaning up from that terrible storm on the East coast. Hope you're all back to normal soon!